Documents: Flames at Midnight
Documents: Flames at Midnight By Carolyn Wakeman The [...]
Exhibition Note: Morrison R. Waite and “Great” Supreme Court Justices
Exhibition Note: Morrison R. Waite and “Great” Supreme Court [...]
Exhibition Note: George Washington’s Visit to Old Lyme
Exhibition Note: George Washington’s Visit to Old Lyme [...]
Exhibition Notes: Matilda Browne’s Historic Lyme Street House, Part I—After the Revolution
Exhibition Note: Matilda Browne’s Historic Lyme Street House, Part [...]
Documents: Women Reading on Lyme Street
A simple hand-stitched notebook, its marbled paper cover faded over the centuries, records the religious, educational, and charitable purposes of Lyme’s earliest women’s organization. Mid-way through the construction of a new Meetinghouse at the foot of what is now Lyme Street, ten ladies from the town’s prominent families gathered in 1816 to establish a reading group.
Landmarks: Painted Gardens, Part 1- Boxwood Manor
The dazzling displays of Old Lyme’s gardens have captured the eye of painters and photographers for more than a century. Beside village lanes and riverbanks, in formal designs and in cultivated wildness, blossoming gardens brought swaths of color to hotel grounds, country estates, and artists’ dooryards. Postcard views of the flowerbeds, hedgerows, rock walls, and fruit trees at Boxwood Manor became almost a signature image of the town’s scenic beauty in the 1930s.
Photographs: Painted Gardens, Part 2—The Ludington Estate
The gardens that surrounded Old Lyme’s Meetinghouse for more than a century trace the changing needs, tastes, and financial circumstances of a prominent local family. A series of images taken in 1925 by photographer Edna Leighton Tyler (1879–1970) captures the sweeping lawns and luxuriant flowerbeds on Katharine Ludington’s estate. But the land behind her elegant Colonial Revival home had once served more practical uses.
Landmarks: Old Lyme’s Meeting House, Part II–The Arson Investigation
The identity of the “firebugs” responsible for burning the Old Lyme Meetinghouse remained a mystery throughout the summer of 1907. Then an attempt to ignite the village schoolhouse in November brought two suspected arsonists to trial.
Photographs: Election Day, 1900
Election day in 1900 fell on Tuesday, November 6, and Old Lyme’s eligible voters cast their ballots at the town hall starting “at 9 o’clock in the forenoon.” Above the polling place a Republican campaign banner declared: “Our Candidates McKinley & Roosevelt.”
